Vegan Bread: Easy Recipe and 8 Types of Vegan Bread

Some types of bread are vegan, while others contain animal products. While bread recipes vary, making bread generally requires four ingredients: flour, water, salt, and yeast (either active dry yeast, instant yeast, or a levain, also known as a starter). As a result, most simple breads built from these four pillars adhere to a vegan diet.

However, enriched breads, like challah and brioche, or leavened flatbreads, like Indian naan, contain animal products like eggs and dairy and are not vegan-friendly.

Vegan bread does not contain eggs, dairy products like milk, buttermilk, butter and clarified butter (ghee), and yogurt. Some dough conditioners and emulsifiers used to make commercial bread, such as l-cysteine hydrochloride, mono or diglycerides, whey, casein, gelatin, or egg-based lecithin, may come from animal fats unless specifically noted as plant-based. When in doubt, check the ingredients list, or look for a plant-based icon on the package. Here are some of the most common types of vegan bread:

1. 1. Chapati: Chapati, also known as roti, is an Indian flatbread made with whole-wheat flour. Many recipes call for brushing the final breads with clarified butter (ghee)—to make them fully vegan, simply omit or replace with vegan butter. Learn how to make Madhur Jaffey’s chapati recipe.
2. 2. Ciabatta: Italian ciabatta contains wheat flour, water, olive oil, salt, and yeast. The name means “slipper” in Italian and refers to its elongated, broad, and flat shape. You can form ciabatta into long rectangles or small squares or rolls; either way, it has a crispy, chewy crust with an airy, hole-filled interior.
3. 3. Corn flour bread: This gluten-free and dairy-free take on traditional cornbread features corn flour in place of cornmeal, oil instead of butter, and flax seeds and oat milk as an alternative binding agent to eggs and milk. Learn how to make corn flour bread.
4. 4. Focaccia: Focaccia is a quintessential, rustic Italian flatbread baked in oil-coated sheet pans, recognizable by its dimpled, crisp exterior. Learn how to make homemade focaccia.
5. 5. Pita: Pita bread is a leavened Middle Eastern flatbread known for its puffy inner pocket—though there are also pocketless versions, such as the kind used for Greek souvlaki. Learn how to make homemade pita bread.
6. 6. Sourdough: Sourdough bread is a blanket term for breads made with a living culture of natural, wild yeast, rather than commercial yeast. Before the invention of commercial instant or dry active yeast, all breads were sourdoughs. Despite the term, not all sourdough bread tastes sour. The category can include everything from crumbly English muffins to crusty-yet-tender baguettes, so long as they are naturally leavened. Not all sourdough breads are vegan, but many are.
7. 7. Sprouted bread: Sprouted breads, like Ezekiel bread, contain a variety of sprouted whole grains, like spelt, and legumes like soybeans and lentils. It’s a common sight in health food grocery stores.
8. 8. Tortillas: Both corn tortillas and flour tortillas are usually vegan. Corn tortillas contain masa, a dough made of dried corn kernels soaked and softened in an alkaline solution (a process called nixtamalization) then finely ground. On the other hand, flour tortillas contain wheat flour, salt, baking powder, oil, and water; gluten from the flour gives flour tortillas their signature elasticity.

Whether you opt for a bread machine, a no-knead bread dough, or prefer to shape each loaf by hand, here are a few tips when tackling homemade bread for a vegan lifestyle:

1. 1. Start with all-purpose or bread flour, then incorporate whole grains. If it’s your first time baking bread, and you’re forgoing traditional binding and leavening ingredients like milk or eggs, start with refined white flours, which rise more reliably thanks to their high gluten content. Once you’ve mastered a white bread such as basic sandwich bread, you can turn your attention to more complex whole-wheat bread.
2. 2. Make vegan substitutions. In many cases, vegan ingredients make great substitutions for traditional baking products, even notoriously fussy enriched breads like brioche. (This is especially true for many quick breads, like vegan banana bread.) Try aquafaba for eggs, oat milk, and vegan butter, olive oil, or vegetable shortening in place of regular butter.
3. 3. Seek out vegan bread brands. Take note of the best vegan breads at the grocery store for inspiration. Pay attention to texture, flavors, and overall mouthfeel—then check the ingredient list to see how they did it.